This year’s early-summer weather in Iqaluit has had its ups and severe downs. It has been cold, grey, and quite uninspiring for home decorating. On the downside, it has brought lots of fog and ice into town that has drawn a number of polar bears near our house lately – meaning that we can’t wander far from home (at least not without ammunition or bear spray). On the upside of it though, it has meant that bug season has been delayed enough for me to spend more time in the front yard doing some landscaping.

I was initially thinking to do just one or two small things to add some curb appeal to our place over the summer. Nevertheless, once one project was started I began finding other little things I could do to improve our curb-side look and my ‘to-do’ list quickly snowballed.

We’re a week into June and our Arctic garden is finally starting to come to life. There may still be plenty of ice and snow in the bay, but in our greenhouse there’s nothing but sprouts, sprouts, sprouts! After a month of very slow starting seeds, our greenhouse is bursting with all sorts of seedlings. I started some of these seeds way back in April – primarily the coriander, basil, and sunflowers – but had to wait until the end of May to get most of the others started (when the greenhouse stopped going below zero). So far I’ve started the season with my favorites:

A few weeks ago, J and I surprised everyone by running off and getting married (more or less)! Granted, there wasn’t that much running considering we did it at a small ceremony at our home here in Iqaluit, by the sea-ice.

It was a elopement of sorts; we told no one, planned it at the last minute, and just barely managed to rangle a few of our closest friends and family together for the event. It was the most perfect kind of wedding for us and it couldn’t have been a better day!

I’ve been a little behind on my ArcticDeco posts these last couple months, but with good reason. It’s the most busiest time of the year for home renovation planning and shopping and sea-lifting and hoarding. I feel like a squirrel in October trying to get all of my nuts together before the winter.

To start, there was sealift shopping in May. That’s when we Northerners flock south for a few days to buy up our year’s supply of goods. Here’s what our Costco order looked like, and that was only a tiny portion of all we had to pick up this year.

I’m very excited to introduce you to Pascale Arpin, who is ARCTICdeco’s first guest blogger! Pascale is a brilliantly talented artist, teacher, and all round lovely lady who came to Iqaluit in 2011 from her home city of Ottawa. She came to Iqaluit out of curiosity and has made this community her long-term (we hope) home. She’s done some incredible work on her first home and major fixer-upper, including this incredible bathroom reno – which puts my little renovations to shame, might I add. She too has begun documenting her reno journey on her blog Cold World Reno, so be sure to bookmark it for exciting future updates.

It’s spring in Nunavut! For most of you ‘southerners’ south of 60, it has already been spring for many weeks now (if not months) but up in the ‘Vut it’s only really started to feel like spring in the last few weeks – ‘spring’ being T-shirt weather. Mind you – in late April when the sun started coming back and we were getting -15ºC temperatures, I may have celebrated the good weather by hanging out on my deck in a tank top. Nevertheless.